Emergence reinflated
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4351211 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alexander Skiles (University of Neuchâtel, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue | 265 |
| Pages | 833-842 |
| Publication date | 2016-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pq/pqw009 |
| OpenAlex | W4234345943 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 11 |
In ‘Collapsing Emergence’, Elanor Taylor argues that all accounts of emergence face a common problem: excluding ‘collapse-inducing’ features—features encoding information about macro-level phenomena—from the micro-level bases of putatively emergent phenomena in a metaphysically principled way. I argue that Taylor's solution to ‘the collapse problem’, which utilizes an explanation-based account of emergence she develops in recent work, does not succeed, as it relies on a false principle about the requirements for explanation. I then propose a better solution, one that presupposes no specific account of emergence, instead relying on the metaphysically principled distinction between what is essential to the having of a feature versus what is not. In addition to solving the collapse problem, I show how the distinction is also a useful tool for articulating more and less robust ways in which emergent phenomena can be genuinely novel and autonomous from the micro-level features they emerge from.
Distinctive feature · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept) · Feature (linguistics) · Linguistics · Metaphysics · Computer Science · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2022 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |